Raven Squad combines real time strategy elements with the first person shooter genre to make an interesting hybrid of the two as you try to lead your group of eight mercenaries out of the treacherous Amazon region you've been shot down in.
You command two squads of four mercenaries, each mercenary having his own personality and special abilities. After being shot down over the Amazon, it's up to you to lead the mercenaries through the jungles and against their enemies to make it home safely.
Basically, the game uses RTS elements to provide command and control over the squads. You can select a squad, give them places to go, take control points, but there's none of the resource gathering or unit creation that other RTS games typically have.
In addition, you have the ability to hop into the first person view of any character in the squads. Sure, you can tell them "use your special ability here", but you if you want, you can take control and use it yourself, or just take the opportunity to blast away with your unlimited ammo. (While you do need to reload, your main weapon never runs out of ammo — though your special abilities do.)
Theoretically, if you wanted to, you could play through the whole game in just one mode or the other. However, more than a few parts of the game will favor one of the two styles and in general it makes the game easier and more fun. But that's not all — you'll also be able to play co-op, so that you control one squad and a friend controls the second squad. Between missions you'll be able to swap squads.
Friendly fire isn't, as the old saying goes, and so you'll need to watch out for that. If one of your squad members goes down they're not necessarily out — you can always try to revive them. One of the nice things in first person mode is that the squad will follow you but didn't appear to try to get in front of you like in some first person shooter games. Instead, each squad of four by default will go back to back so that they cover all 360 degrees.
The controls are fairly simple - the game is coming out for both the Xbox 360 and the PC, shooting for a fall release. While there's no multiplayer other than the co-op game, as of right now it's looking like it will be approximately 11 missions plus a tutorial, for no less than 10 hours of playtime. It's not the most sophisticated title in the world but it looks to be a solid, fun budget game.
I'm a 29 year old senior network and systems engineer for a consulting firm in the DC area. I'm mostly into MMOs and FPSes (on the console), and I'm a big pro football fan. In my other spare time I like to write and tend to read copious amounts of history and military sci-fi. I'm also into cooking and bad action movies.
